Printing the Image - Stone Town, Zanzibar Portfolio - Part 1

I’ve dropped a few hints lately about various projects I’m working on (yes, projects plural) and I’ve finally gotten around to pushing one towards completion.  Continue on to find out about the making of my first printed folio from digital images . . . well the beginning of it at least.

To be honest, this portfolio has been a long coming.  I’ve spent several years wanting to do it, a lot of time thinking about it, and over the past month or so, quite a bit of time compiling the images, working on each potential image from scratch, selecting from them, deciding on the sequencing of them and then ultimately revising what I wanted this folio of images to be, thus having to re-do the image sequencing.  (All of which might change after all of the images are printed.)  If you’ve been with us for awhile, you’ve seen some of the images I made when I was in Zanzibar, and you’ll know that I’ve even printed some of them to see how well they would look in printed form.  Well it was time to take the next step and to bring them together as a completed body of work and to focus on other projects.  (That’s the nice way of saying, “Dan, be done with it already!”).  

The whole notion of a portfolio raises dozens of questions that don’t really come up when you’re just thinking about going out and making photographs.  Perhaps it’s the logical result of printing images, or maybe even from making so many images, but the question arises of what do you do with all of them?  Particularly ones that appeal to you, that want to have a life outside of a hard drive, and that seem to want to be seen together?  The obvious answer is to print a bunch of them as a collective whole.  And since I’m not likely to have a gallery show to hang a bunch of them on a wall any time soon, they have to get packaged together somehow.

This is where a product I purchased before we left the US comes in handy.  It’s a folded, thick paper “folio” that can hold photographs.  It’s intended to make printed photographic images easily accessible and, important for my personal tastes, to be viewed while held in the hands.  There is something very intimate about holding a photograph in your hands as opposed to turning pages in a portfolio or a book (or looking at them on a gallery wall), and I wanted these images to be held and looked at close up.  That’s why I may alternate back and forth between calling this a portfolio of images and a folio of images.  

One of the decisions I had to make was whether I was going to make a cover sheet.  You see, the folio has a cut-out window, on the side that doesn’t open up, to allow for some text or something to identify what is inside.  Deciding that I did not want to (or learn how to) print “Stone Town” or “Zanzibar” or whatever over a photograph that would show through the window, I decided to select an abstract photograph of a wall I took to use as the “cover” image.  I’ll know what’s inside from seeing the center portion of this image and that’s all I need.  And I won’t freak out if it gets damaged in any way like I might with the other images.  It might even add to the “character” of the image.  

I have quite a few images from my short stay in Stone Town that I have no reservations showing people.  Some are downright beautiful, others offer an interesting, sometimes fun look at life in Zanzibar.  But in the end, I decided to limit my images to the ones I took early on a Sunday morning as Stone Town woke up.  Unlike the images from the previous day, or later that Sunday, all of the images used were taken with my Fuji x100, which has a single focal-length lens.  This gives all of the images a consistent field of view and, what ultimately made me decide to go this route, a consistent color palette.  As beautiful and interesting as some of my sunset images were with guys swimming in the ocean and hanging off of boats, orange sunsets (or brilliant blue skies) didn’t flow well with these early morning images given the limited number of images I wanted to keep the portfolio to.

The photo printing sessions Ann and I have been doing, the most recent one in particular, helped resolve another issue I hadn’t realized I had.  I’d initially thought that I’d use my favorite paper, Red River Paolo Duro Soft Gloss Rag, for these images.  But once I printed with the Red River Paolo Duro Smooth Fine Art Paper (a mistaken purchase that has turned out to be a happy accident) during our last session, I decided that the Paolo Duro Smooth helped contribute to the feel of being in Stone Town in an early morning without sacrificing any of the detail or color that the Soft Gloss Rag would have provided.  The matte paper, even though it is not textured, conveys a visual roughness to the walls in each image that the glossier papers I’ve printed some of the images on lack.  

The one drawback with the matte paper is that it doesn’t hold dark values (blacks) as well.  So what I have to do is take each of the images that I’ve developed from scratch to what I believe it’s final form should be, make a copy of it, and then apply an ICC profile of the paper/printer combination to that copy image.  What happens with the matte paper (and most matte papers) is that the dark values lighten up a bit and the contrast decreases a bit.  That means I have to re-work the image to bring it back (well, as close as possible) to what I’d decided was “right” on my calibrated monitor.  And I have to do that for each of the images in the portfolio.  While noticeable at the start, the necessary corrections in these instances aren’t particularly difficult to correct for and they generally involved the same type of adjustments for each image to bring them back to what I wanted.  (Another advantage to having taken all of the images with the same camera in generally the same lighting conditions.)  Fortunately, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the combination of Capture One, my calibrated BenQ monitor, and the Epson P900 has so far (knock on wood) been spot on, and I haven’t had to re-print any of the images because they didn’t quite turn out right.  All of our meticulous efforts are paying off.

But of course there was a hiccup.  Given Ann and I are getting our printing legs under us again (not that we had ever “mastered” the printing process), there of course arose technical issues that I didn’t have answers to.  Should I export the images as 8-bit TIFF files to print or 16-bit TIFF files to print (and “why didn’t I think of this question in our previous printing sessions?”).  As any good photographer learning new skills should do, I printed all 4 using both export recipes just to see and find out for myself.  Of course, I also did a bit of research to understand the differences between the files and, more importantly, when those difference may come into play.  Let’s just say that I’ll continue to develop the images as 16-bit files (or as large as I can), but when it comes to printing, most of the time I suspect I’ll be using the 8-bit TIFF file unless certain conditions exist for which the 8-bit and 16-bit files may produce different results.  And for those who care to know, the 8-bit TIFF files were approximately 37MB in size, the 16-bit files were 74MB.  Even in these days of cheap memory, that’s a lot of storage space per file.  As for the prints - I couldn’t tell any difference between the two versions and, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have expected there to be any, so that’s good.  Lesson learned and it only cost me the price of 4 sheets of paper plus ink and a bit of time doing online research as the images were printing.

This is just the first printing session of the Stone Town, Zanzibar portfolio.  It’s likely to consist of 12 images plus the wall cover sheet, so I’ve got a couple of more printing sessions (or one long one) to go.  The up side to that is you have more Zanzibar images to look forward to!